


Breaking the Curse

by TurtleTotem



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: (the animal is okay), Alternate Universe - Lawyers, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Animal Abuse, M/M, New Year's Eve, New Year's Kiss, New Year's Resolutions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:48:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22058803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TurtleTotem/pseuds/TurtleTotem
Summary: Every year, Damen falls in love with someone at his friend Nik's New Year's Eve party. Every year that person breaks his heart.This year is going to be different.(On Tumblrhere.)
Relationships: Damen/Laurent (Captive Prince)
Comments: 47
Kudos: 376





	Breaking the Curse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [covertius](https://archiveofourown.org/users/covertius/gifts).



Damen was beginning to wonder if Nik's New Year's Eve party was cursed.

Nikandros had thrown a grand blowout party every New Year's Eve since they graduated law school and got real jobs—Nik at a prestigious corporate firm because he had the talent and intellect to go far, Damen at the state prosecutor's office because he had the desire to fight for justice and the financial ability to focus on his ethics more than his slender paycheck. Even though he and Nikandros still lived in the same city, they moved in different circles and worked very different schedules; it wasn't all that easy for Damen to see his best friend. For that reason, and the fact that the party itself was incredible, with fireworks and performing acrobats and an open bar, Damen did not want to miss it. But he was starting to think he ought to.

Because every year Nikandros threw a New Year's Eve party, and every year Damen fell in love with the worst—or at least worst for _him_ —person there.

The first year had been Erasmus, a shy sweet submissive paralegal whom Damen doted on for ten months… until he reconnected with his high school sweetheart, leaving Damen devastated and on the rebound just in time for the next New Year's Eve party.

That year he'd met the hot and glamorous Kashel, someone else's plus-one who had dumped her boyfriend and torn Damen's clothes off in a closet before midnight—but that went nowhere in a hurry. It turned out that all he and Kashel had in common was sex, which was spectacular but not what Damen wanted in the long term. They parted ways, amicably enough, by April.

Most recently, after a long (for him) dry spell, he'd met Jokaste at the third year's party—a partner from one of Nik's firm's rivals, who hadn't actually been invited. She had proceeded to turn Damen's entire brain inside out for months, before eloping with his brother the day before Thanksgiving. _That_ had made for an awkward family dinner.

"My party is cursed?" Nikandros repeated when Damen told him his theory, pacing his apartment with his phone in one hand and the party invitation in the other. "That's what you're taking away from this? Not, say, an indication that you jump into relationships way too freaking fast?"

"Wow, way to blame the victim," Damen said.

"I'm right and you know it. You always think someone is your soulmate based on warm pants-feelings and a ten-minute conversation in which you don't hate them. And the only time you meet new people is at my parties."

"None of that is true!"

"I think you should definitely come, Damen. You'll meet a new soulmate, or at least a new Kashel—that didn't turn out too badly. Some awesome rebound sex is just what you need."

"No. I don't want a rebound. I don't even want a date. I want to stop getting my heart broken over and over. The woman I wanted to marry blew up my world _and_ my family less than a month ago. I want to _rest_."

"Well, stay home then, dude," Nikandros said gently. "I'm not gonna get my feelings hurt about it, I promise."

"No. You know what? No!" Damen dropped the invitation to smack one fist into the other. "I'm gonna come, and see my best friend, and have a great time, and not pair off with _anybody_ , and break the stupid curse! It'll be my New Year's resolution—go to your party and fall in love with absolutely no one!"

Nik laughed. "I don't think that's exactly how New Year's resolutions work, but okay, sure! I'll see you tomorrow night."

"Damn straight you will!"

***

A minor emergency at work had Damen late arriving to Nik's party. He stepped out of the elevator into what was a tastefully luxurious apartment on a normal day, and had now been transformed by twinkling lights, multicolored fountains (rented, he assumed) and circulating waitstaff into a revel of high glamour. Jazzy music filled the space between conversations, and people in tuxes and slinky black gowns gathered in knots around the piano, the refreshment table, the bar, and the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the sparkling city.

"Damen!" Nikandros called, waving over the heads of the crowd. "You did make it! Get a drink, I'll be right over!"

Damen waved back, and happily accepted the glass of wine a passing server offered him. He took a swallow, looked up—and caught sight of the most beautiful human being he'd ever seen in his life.

Blond hair, arctic blue eyes, the fine high-cheeked features of an elven prince. His expression was haughty and displeased, but that did nothing to decrease his appeal; it was all too easy to imagine him coolly evaluating the strength of the knots holding Damen to the bed. He took a broody sip from his glass, tipping it up and revealing a pale, elegant neck. Damen felt his mouth fall open.

 _Cursed_ , he thought, his stomach going into freefall. _This party is definitely cursed_. And it was too late to do anything about it. If he turned around and went home right this second, this guy would still be the only thing he thought about the rest of the night.

And then the server who'd given Damen his wine, a dark-haired young man who looked barely out of high school, walked past the arctic beauty. And the arctic beauty tossed his empty glass at him. Surprised and with a tray balanced in his hand, the server couldn't possibly have caught it; instinctively he tried, and in so doing, dropped his entire tray with a shocking crash and shatter of glass.

The arctic beauty looked the devastated server dead in the eye, laughed, and walked away.

As he went, he lifted a vape pen to his lips, and began filling the surrounding air with a cloud of peppermint-scented vapor.

Damen's heart leaped with delight. Yes. This was perfect. The man's behavior was exactly as appalling as his appearance was inviting; Damen had just found the one person at this party who would thoroughly distract him from hooking up with anyone else, while also making it impossible for Damen to fall in love with him. It was the perfect solution.

Other party attendees had already stepped forward to help the server with the mess of his dropped tray; Damen stepped around them and made his way through the crowd toward the jerk, following the cloud of eye-stinging peppermint and the mutters of complaint against it.

By the time he caught up with the jerk, Nikandros had cornered him against one of the windows and was telling him off.

"—and put that thing away right now," Nik said, jabbing a finger at the vape pen. "Don't you have the sense God gave a kindergartener? Any one of them could tell you that's an outside toy."

The beautiful jerk rolled his eyes, taking a deep drag that was equal parts obnoxious and picturesquely sexy, and put away the vape. "Yes, sir," he drawled, in a voice lower than his appearance might indicate, and mocking almost to the point of flirtation. What little of Damen's blood had not headed south started packing for the trip.

"Hey," Damen said, which was all he could think of to say.

"Damen, hey," Nik said, in a tone of abstracted relief. "Um, this is Laurent de Vere, a new _junior_ attorney," he skewered Laurent with a dark glance, "at my firm. Laurent, this is my best friend, Damen. Be nice to him."

"Charmed," Laurent said, and extended his hand.

Instead of shaking it, Damen gave a flourishing bow and pressed a kiss to Laurent's knuckles.

Laurent looked intrigued, his eyebrows climbing. Nikandros looked horrified.

"Nik," somebody called, "there's something wrong with this fountain, it's making a mess…"

Nikandros groaned, made apologetic noises at Damen, and hurried off.

"So what's Nikandros like to work with?" Damen asked.

"You know how some species of water-creature survive being frozen all winter by lowering their brain function to almost undetectable levels?" Laurent said. "Imagine one of those working in law."

Damen choked on a shocked laugh.

"Laurent, I thought that was you!" A middle-aged woman paused on her way past them. "Goodness, I didn't realize you'd been invited!"

"And I didn't realize frosted tips were back, Madeline," Laurent said sweetly. "Oh—oh, you're just going gray. How mortifying. My mistake."

Madeline drew in an outraged breath.

"Er, let's just get another drink, Madeline," said the man at her elbow, whom Damen recognized as a longtime business acquaintance of Nik's.

"Yes, I'm sure another drink is _just_ what you need, sir," Laurent said, which, considering the drunken hijinks the man had committed at last year's party, made Damen bite his lip to keep from cackling. The man turned red, and he and Madeline both slunk away.

"Aren't you just the social butterfly," Damen said.

"Oh yes, my goal in life," Laurent said, "winning the approval of the rich and shallow. I'm just as rich and shallow as any of them, and they know it. I have nothing to prove."

"Let me get you a drink," Damen said.

"Tempting as it is to spend this evening in a haze of alcohol, getting drunk in front of my boss—who is here somewhere—would be even less helpful to my career than skipping this party," Laurent said. "Oh, look, there's Allen Mortimer, whose embezzlement trial recently ended in a hung jury, I simply _must_ say hello…"

Damen followed Laurent around the party, listening in fascination to his seemingly endless supply of cruel and cutting witticisms, both behind the subjects' backs and to their faces. No foible was forgiven, no flaw went unobserved. How Laurent even knew some of these things was a mystery to Damen. Nor did Damen himself escape unscathed; Laurent once introduced him as "Nik's idiot friend, who is hoping to get into my pants," and another time as "my hired escort; the muscles were extra." This last was given, fortunately, to people Damen already knew, who found it uproariously funny.

Every remark—except for the escort one—was both clever and true, and most were hilarious. Laurent was obviously brilliant, and also a remarkably hateful little snot.

"You must be a terror in the courtroom," Damen said.

"I'm sure you are, as well," Laurent replied. "Such moon-faced slow-witted obstinacy is very hard to combat. Like trying to swordfight a glacier." He looked up from the wineglass he'd bullied a server into filling with apple cider. "I'm not going to sleep with you. Why do you keep following me around?"

Before Damen could formulate an answer, a ruckus at the nearest window drew his attention. Several people were gathered at the glass, pointing and exclaiming at something on the other side. Snow suddenly spattered against the glass. A snowball?

He and Laurent reached the window at the same time, pushing their way to the front until they could see what was happening.

A gray tabby cat was tangled in the Christmas lights on the fire escape, thrashing in panic. Some boys, barely visible on the ground below, were hopping around excitedly and throwing snowballs at the cat.

Laurent hissed under his breath, a startling and furious sound, and bodily shoved two people aside to yank the window open. It didn't want to move at first; Damen pulled at the other side, and up it came. Laurent scrambled through onto the fire escape.

 _"Get away from here or I will make you regret it,"_ he shouted down at the boys, his voice clear and crisp and incensed.

"Up yours," one of the boys shouted back.

Laurent scraped snow off the railing of the fire escape, packed a ball, and pegged that boy in the face hard enough to knock him on his butt—all in less than a second.

Damen was cautiously approaching the cat, making soft shushing noises. It stopped thrashing and stared at him, ears pinned and teeth bared, making the weirdest, scariest bubbling growl he had ever heard.

Below, the boys were laughing at their downed friend, sounds that changed tenor as they noticed Laurent packing another snowball. Their voices and footsteps trailed away as they chose the better part of valor—still laughing, but leaving.

"The lights are around his hips and back leg," Damen said as Laurent turned his attention to the cat. "He's gonna bite me sure as the world if I try to touch him. Maybe if you distract him…"

Laurent made a thoughtful noise, and took off his tuxedo jacket. It was already cold as, well, as a late-December night, fire escape open to the wind and snow, and neither of them were wearing coats, but Laurent showed no sign of discomfort. A minute ago, Damen would have said it was because he was carved of ice himself. Harder to think that now.

"Wrap this around her front half," Laurent said, tossing the jacket to Damen, "and I'll disentangle the back half. Don't let her get away; she's pulled that back leg out of joint. Needs a vet."

Damen looked at the cat's wide-blown freaked-out eyes and glittering claws. "I'll… try," he said. "One, two, three!"

He leaped forward and tackled the cat, throwing the jacket over her head. She screamed pitiably, and her claws went right through the jacket into his arms, but he'd resigned himself to that much. At least the jacket did keep her from biting him.

Laurent had the harder job, trying to hold down her injured leg while she kicked for all she was worth. He swore a blue streak, and came out of it with a score of scratches of his own, but finally the cat was free of the Christmas lights. Laurent shoved the rest of her up into the jacket; Damen did his best to wrap her up.

"Where's the nearest emergency vet?" Laurent called—to someone behind them, Damen realized, and turned his head to see Nikandros staring through the open window. "Or her owner—do you know her owner?"

Nik shook his head. "She's a stray, me and the neighbors have been taking turns feeding her."

"Right. Well, we need to get her in out of the cold, and get her to the vet." Laurent's voice brooked no argument. "Clear us a path to a warm, quiet room, find an emergency vet, and call a cab."

Damen ended up taking a bit more damage to the skin of his arms, wrestling the cat into a cat-carrier Nik borrowed from the neighbor. They'd taken over the bathroom, he and Laurent and the cat, and Laurent used the antiseptic he found in its cabinets to clean Damen's scratches, silent and expressionless as the cat screamed bloody murder inside the carrier.

"Yowch!" Damen couldn't keep himself from flinching from the sting.

"Baby," Laurent muttered, cleaning his own scratches without a flicker of discomfort. "Her leg hurts a lot worse than your arms."

"I'm sure," Damen muttered, watching the cat clawing at the door to the carrier. "Poor thing, she's so scared."

"She'll be fine," Laurent said shortly, but flinched when the cat gave a particularly heartrending yowl—the only sign that anything he'd experienced all night had bothered him.

 _There's a lot more to you than I thought._ Damen found himself watching Laurent—indirectly, in the mirror—as he crouched in front of the carrier making _spspspsp_ noises, and couldn't make himself look away even when Laurent caught him at it and glared.

Damen wasn't actually sure how he ended up accompanying Laurent and the cat into the cab. It didn't take two people, surely, to drop a cat at the vet, especially when the vet was expecting them and already knew the situation. But into the cab he went, and into the vet's office he went, and before he knew it he and Laurent were sitting in plastic chairs together, waiting for the cat's initial prognosis. They could hear her howling all the way down the hall.

"I'm really more of a dog person," Laurent said suddenly, after a long silence. "Not that I actually own one. But I get along better with dogs. Cats are… We're too much alike, me and cats."

One corner of Damen's mouth tipped up. "I can believe that."

"You're more like a dog," Laurent said, and then looked away, as if embarrassed by his own words.

"Sloppy and dumb?" Damen said brightly.

"No, that's not what I—I mean, yes, obviously that, but—" Laurent's ears were turning red.

Damen couldn't stop smiling. "I might be more insulted if you hadn't just finished saying how much you like dogs."

"What is this, _Jupiter Ascending_? I do not like dogs, and I do not like you!"

"But you like _Jupiter Ascending_ ," Damen said. "Enough to have parts of the dialogue memorized."

"Well, you recognized it, so—"

"So we have more in common than I thought." Damen continued smiling, and enjoyed watching Laurent flail for a response.

"You have a low opinion of high society," Damen said after a moment. "You've spent enough time in it to have dirt on everybody, so you know whereof you speak. You hate them all, but you have to move among them to do your job, so you cope by channeling Dorothy Parker. I get that much."

"Oh, you've got my number, have you?" Laurent said nastily.

"Not yet," Damen said. "Because what I _don't_ get is how the man that climbed out on a fire escape without a coat and rescued a cat—and gave up his New Year's Eve to bring it here—is the same man that was willfully cruel to the waitstaff for kicks."

Laurent appeared struck by this. "I suppose that looked bad, out of context."

"What possible context could make it look good?"

"Nothing could make it look good," Laurent admitted. "I wanted to hurt and humiliate Aimeric, and I succeeded. Very petty of me. No moral high ground there. But it might help to mention that the last time I saw him, Aimeric wasn't working as a waiter. He was the personal assistant to a very powerful man, and a witness in a child abuse case against that man, a witness I thought we could trust to turn the tide of the case. Instead he lied on the stand, ensuring that man got off scot free." Laurent closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "He's probably a victim himself, frankly. I ought to try to have compassion. But I had to send a little boy back to a nightmare he thought he'd escaped, because of that piece of shit. So yes, I was delighted to see him reduced to serving drinks, and delighted to have a chance to make his life a little more difficult."

"A child abuse case?" Damen said, somewhat inanely, since that was the first of the many surprises Laurent had just hit him with.

"Yes, I'm part of the firm's family law department."

That wasn't what Damen had expected of Laurent at all. But a lot of this conversation was tending that way.

"Mr. de Vere," said a vet tech, coming into the otherwise-empty waiting room. "We've successfully gotten your cat's dislocated leg back into place, which was her only major injury, I'm happy to say. She's under sedation right now and we'll need to keep her under observation for tonight. Once you get her home you'll need to keep her confined and sedentary—as much as you can, I mean—for a few weeks so she can rest and heal without re-injuring herself."

"She's not my," Laurent began, then heaved a deep sigh and rubbed his eyes. "Right. Okay."

"She can stay at my place," Damen said, the words bypassing any common-sense filter he might have possessed. "I have a guest room."

Laurent stared at him. "You don't even know if she's litterbox trained."

Damen shrugged, not about to back down now that he'd made the offer. "It'll be fine."

"I'm sure can work out the details when you come pick her up tomorrow," the tech said. "For tonight, you can rest easy, knowing she's okay and in good hands."

They turned toward the closest tube station outside the vet clinic, their breaths puffing dragon-like in the cold air.

"I could commit war crimes for a cigarette right now," Laurent muttered, huddling into his coat.

"Cigarette?" Damen said. "I thought you were a vaper."

Laurent sighed. "The vaping is supposed to help me quit. My New Year's resolution last year was to quit smoking, see. So I've spent the last three days desperately pretending I can still pull it off before the end of the year." He gave Damen a sideways look. "I'm probably even bitchier than usual, tonight, due to that." It had the air of an apology.

Damen smiled wryly. "Broken resolutions. I know how that goes. This year I've managed to break my New Year's resolution before the new year even started."

They were walking past a bar; inside, people with goofy year-numbered glasses and hats were cheering and clustering around the TV screens, which showed footage of Times Square and the traditional descending ball. They both stopped to watch.

"I don't think that's how resolutions even work," Laurent said. "What was the resolution?"

_"Five! Four! Three!"_

"I'll tell you later."

_"Two! One!"_

"Tell me now," Laurent said, and Damen kissed him.

Laurent's lips were cold at first, but warmed quickly under his, Laurent's gloved hands fumbling with Damen's coat to pull him closer. He kissed Damen back in an artless, innocent, almost clumsy way that was as unexpected as it was charming, and he kept his eyes closed for a second after Damen finally—reluctantly—pulled back.

"Happy New Year," Damen said, leaning their foreheads together.

Laurent tried to speak, cleared his throat, tried again. "Happy New Year. What were you about to tell me?"

"That Nik's New Year's Eve party is cursed. I'm really glad I decided to come."

"You," Laurent said, "do not make any sense. I like that about you." He pulled Damen in for another kiss, and Damen was happy to oblige.


End file.
